By Tobi Loba
Due to the congestion noticed on the Ethereum (ETH) network since the end of April 2020, some developers and community members are calling for an increase in gas limit, which defines its transaction throughput.
Data from Etherscan reveals that the average gas price increased by over three-fold since the beginning of May 2020, with an average of relatively 30 Gwei in the last few days.
Going by EthGasStation report, this results in about $0.16 fee to effect a simple ETH transaction. This increase in transaction fees is already having a notable impact on on-chain activity for gaming decentralized applications (DApps).
Developers and Ethereum community Members Calls for Increase in Gas Limit
A number of Ethereum (ETH) developers such as 1inch exchange are requesting an increase in gas limit by a factor of at least 2.5, which would increase the capacity of the network and reduce transaction fees.
Should @Ethereum miner increase block limit size?#DeFi
— 1inch Network (@1inchNetwork) June 4, 2020
The gas limit or block size in Ethereum (ETH) represents the maximum number of calculations that can be inserted into a block. This looks so much like the concept of block size in Bitcoin (BTC).
Vitalik Buterin Responds to the Request
The co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin, shared his opinion regarding the request related to the increase in gas limit.
In his reaction, he averred that they should rather lobby for an increase in the gas limit between 12M and 15M, stating that a call for 25M could be unrealistic.
“25M is unrealistic imo. If you want to lobby for a higher gaslimit better to shoot for 12-15M,” Vitalik Buterin responded.
25M is unrealistic imo. If you want to lobby for a higher gaslimit better to shoot for 12-15M.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 4, 2020
However, Buterin further stated that “…many client devs are concerned about risks even at those levels.”
Proposing an alternative solution, he wrote, “Alternatively lobby for reducing gas costs of specific operations (eg. base tx cost -> 14000, storage-changing SSTORE -> 4000). This way you can get ~20% capacity increase without straining any of the things that we know to be DoS risks.”